LMP responds after Demeter comes under pressure to quit

LMP has rebuffed a call on lawmaker Márta Demeter, who is running to co-lead the green opposition party, to resign after she claimed that Flóra Orbán, the two-year-old daughter of a Hungarian army officer serving in Cyprus who had flown on a Hungarian military aircraft, was the prime minister’s daughter.

LMP said on Thursday that Demeter had reviewed publicly accessible documents containing a list of passengers on the military aircraft bound for Hungary from Cyprus before suggesting that a member of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s family had travelled on the plane.

Since the ministry of defence had refused to disclose any information regarding the flight in question, Demeter viewed documents in the public domain and submitted a written query on the matter to the ministry, LMP’s spokesman Máté Kanász-Nagy said at a press conference.

He cited Demeter as saying that she accessed the documents legally, adding that LMP would take action once in possession of the ministry’s response.

Referring to the Fidesz group leader, Kanász-Nagy said that Kocsis “has nothing to do with the matter; he is not even a member of government … he has no remit to call on anyone to do anything.”

Meanwhile,

Szilárd Németh, the Fidesz head of parliament’s national security committee, said that Demeter “has proven herself to be a national security risk”.

“Someone like this can’t be entrusted with a leadership position in this body,” Németh told journalists, referring to Demeter’s role as deputy head of the committee. He accused Demeter of having abused her position to obtain the plane’s passenger list and repeated Fidesz’s call for her to resign.

The ministry of defence “won’t let anyone put the safety of a Hungarian soldier and their family at risk for political gain,” Németh said. He insisted Demeter had acted irresponsibly and “violated every law” concerning the review of public documents.

Demeter told a subsequent press conference that her actions were “not only reasonable but also legal”.

She reviewed documents of public interests at the air base in Kecskemét, central Hungary, and “put questions [to ministers] that followed from those documents”.

She said she is expecting written answers from the interior and defence ministers and will act accordingly, she said.

Demeter also said that she had no intention of resigning as she was “doing the job my voters elected me to do … an important part of which is holding the government accountable.”